The wreck of the Altalena, the arms ship at the center of one of the most consequential confrontations in Israel’s early history, has been located 78 years after it sank off the Israeli coast.
The discovery was announced today following a complex maritime search operation, with the vessel found intact at a depth of 503 meters west of Israel.
Approximately 1 million shekels was invested in the search, whose completion was announced by Israeli ministers Amichai Eliyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The Altalena, carrying weapons and fighters for the Irgun (Etzel), arrived in June 1948 as the newly established State of Israel was consolidating its armed factions into the Israel Defense Forces. A dispute between the government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, over control and distribution of the weapons escalated into armed clashes, culminating on June 22, 1948, when IDF forces shelled the ship off Tel Aviv and it caught fire.
16 Irgun members and 3 IDF soldiers were killed during the wider confrontation, which brought the fledgling state dangerously close to an internal Jewish civil war and became one of the defining political and military crises of Israel’s founding period.
“Anything but a civil war.”
— Menachem Begin, 1948
The discovery was announced today following a complex maritime search operation, with the vessel found intact at a depth of 503 meters west of Israel.
Approximately 1 million shekels was invested in the search, whose completion was announced by Israeli ministers Amichai Eliyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The Altalena, carrying weapons and fighters for the Irgun (Etzel), arrived in June 1948 as the newly established State of Israel was consolidating its armed factions into the Israel Defense Forces. A dispute between the government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, over control and distribution of the weapons escalated into armed clashes, culminating on June 22, 1948, when IDF forces shelled the ship off Tel Aviv and it caught fire.
16 Irgun members and 3 IDF soldiers were killed during the wider confrontation, which brought the fledgling state dangerously close to an internal Jewish civil war and became one of the defining political and military crises of Israel’s founding period.
“Anything but a civil war.”
— Menachem Begin, 1948